Scott Harrer, brand director at Tiversa, said the security company has unearthed numerous sensitive documents on P2P networks that were later posted on WikiLeaks. The whistleblower Web site said all the documents had been anonymously leaked to it.

Bloomberg published some examples of Tiversa's latest claims.

For instance, WikiLeaks in 2009 published a document that exposed sensitive information about infrastructure upgrades at the Pentagon's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii. WikiLeaks claimed to have obtained the document from a source, though it had been available on a P2P network at least two months earlier, according to the Bloomberg report.

Bloomberg also cited WikiLeaks' posting posting of what it called a leaked spreadsheet containing detailed information on potential terrorist targets in Fresno County, Calif. The report said the the data was in fact inadvertently posted on a file-sharing network by a California state employee in August 2008.

In an interview, Harrer provided two more examples to Computerworld.

He said that WikiLeaks' release of Microsoft's Computer Online Forensics Evidence Extractor (COFEE) tool and related documentation in Nov. 2009 came several weeks after the information first become available on P2P networks.

WikiLeak's announcement of the Microsoft document suggests that it was obtained from a source, though it also appears to reference its previous availability on P2P networks.